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The Ones Who Went Back
Migration stories are told in one direction. A quiet counter-current of Indian-Australians is packing up Sydney and Melbourne lives and returning to India, and their reasons deserve a proper hearing.
Every migration story this magazine tells has the same underlying compass bearing: India to Australia, hardship to establishment, departure to arrival. It is the community’s founding narrative. It is also no longer the whole story.
SBS Hindi has been documenting a phenomenon that community WhatsApp groups discuss constantly and mainstream coverage barely touches: Indian-Australians, including settled professionals with permanent residency and citizenship, choosing to move back to India. There is no official statistic that captures the trend cleanly, because departure data does not record intent, and it would be dishonest to pretend anyone knows the true number. What exists is a steady accumulation of families making the move, and an advisory industry of relocation guides and NRI financial planners that has grown up specifically to serve them, which is usually a reliable sign that a market exists.
Why people go
The reasons reported across SBS Hindi’s interviews and the NRI advisory literature cluster into three groups, and none of them is failure.
The first is opportunity. The India that this generation left in the 2000s is not the India that exists now, and for senior professionals in technology, finance and management, the salary conversation at the right level in Bengaluru or Gurugram has become genuinely competitive once purchasing power is counted. Returning no longer reads as giving up; for some careers it reads as a promotion.
The second is family. The parent visa mathematics covered previously in this magazine, with queues running well over a decade for many applicants, forces a brutal choice on only children and eldest sons and daughters: bring ageing parents here on temporary visas and hope, or go to them. Some do the sum and book the flight west.
The third is the cost and texture of life here. Housing pressure, childcare costs, the distance from everything familiar: the same forces documented across this magazine’s reporting on rents, deposits and visa fees weigh heaviest on families in their thirties and forties, exactly the cohort most able to re-establish elsewhere.
What going back actually involves
The practicalities are unglamorous and mostly unwritten about. Australian superannuation stays locked for permanent residents until preservation age. Indian tax residency arrives with obligations, including declaring foreign assets, Australian accounts and super included, in Schedule FA of the Indian return. There are schools to choose in a system parents half-remember, and a reverse culture shock the relocation guides warn about with surprising candour: the returnee who discovers they have become slightly Australian, queuing instinctively and missing the quiet.
And for many, the door stays propped open. Citizenship and PR make return migration reversible, which is precisely why it is thinkable. Some families describe the move as an experiment with an exit clause, which may be the most honest way any migration has ever been framed.
The takeaway
A community mature enough to celebrate its arrivals should be secure enough to talk about its departures. The ones who went back are not cautionary tales, and treating them as such flattens what is really happening: a globally mobile community with two viable homes, making the same calculation their parents made, in the other direction. If you have made the move, or are weighing it, this magazine wants to hear from you. The next chapter of this story should be told by the people living it.
